Trump says travel ban ‘should be far larger’ – Los Angeles Times

Here’s our look at the Trump administration and the rest of Washington:

Sept. 15, 2017, 9:47 a.m.

Reporting from Washington

Trump says travel ban ‘should be far larger’

President Trump signaled he would like his controversial travel ban expanded, writing on Twitter on Friday that his ban on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries “should be far larger, tougher and more specific” but complaining that enlarging it would not be “politically correct.”

Trump wrote the tweet in response to news of an explosion in London on an underground train during morning rush hour. British authorities said they were treating the incident as a terrorist act.

Trump went further than British officials and said the perpetrators were “in the sights” of Scotland Yard investigators before the attack. There is no public evidence to support this claim.

In what seemed to be a response to Trump’s tweet, London Metropolitan Police said in a statement, “any speculation is extremely unhelpful at this time.”

Later Friday morning Trump called the London attack “a terrible thing,” while he was in the Rose Garden watching an 11-year-old boy from Falls Church, Va., mow the White House lawn.

“It keeps going and going, and we have to be very smart and we have to be very, very tough—perhaps we’re not nearly tough enough,” he said in response to a question from a reporter.

Trump said he had been briefed on the London attack, and said he had been told about “new risks of things happening.”

Trump has a chance to widen the travel ban later this month.

The 90-day ban is set to expire on Sept. 24, and Department of Homeland Security officials are considering whether to expand the ban to other countries, keep it the same, or take countries off the list.

Trump administration officials are also reviewing what new vetting procedures for travelers should be put into place, including requiring visa applicants from some countries to submit to checks of their social media accounts. Trump has called similar procedures “extreme vetting.”

Currently, foreign nationals are banned from six countries — Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. Iraq was dropped from the banned countries list in March in exchange for accepting Iraqi nationals being deported from the U.S.

Refugees without close ties to the U.S. are also barred entry until Oct. 24 under the ban.

Trump administration officials issued a revised travel ban in March that was designed to resolve the legal problems that had led to Trump’s original order being blocked in January. The Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge next month of the revised ban.